I'm the Chief Product Officer of Forbes Media. It's been a long journey: The New York Times, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, a little tabloid TV, AOL -- and I certainly don't want to forget TMZ. I lived through a newspaper strike (sounds quaint, right?), the New York City Black Out in '77, and my bout with the Cabbage Patch Dolls. I was the founder and CEO of True/Slant, which FORBES invested in and acquired four years ago. I got hooked on the News business as the student editor of The Daily Iowan during the days of Vietnam, Watergate and Roe v. Wade. I can quote all the best lines from "All the President's Men," and I still think Howard Beale did it better than all the real-life pretenders who followed him. I owe so much to James Bellows -- a truly gifted editor, an extraordinary human being and a mentor who was always there for me.

Forbes Update: Our Strategy Comes Alive on a New and Exciting Mobile Site

Ever since I arrived at FORBES our mobile site has been a source of great frustration. I heard complaints from cell phone users, my friends and our staff members. Bruce Upbin, who leads our Technology channel, especially enjoyed harassing me. My reply: “We’ll fix it. But first things first.”

Before attacking mobile, we needed to develop and implement our core strategy. That meant building a new, scalable content engine and an article page with individual branding and social layers that connected our staff reporters and contributors (now 900 or so) with each other and their followers. We also needed to get our People, Places and Company initiative underway. By staying focused, we’ve accomplished all that and so much more.

It’s been a long time coming, but our new mobile product is now up and running, optimized for both IOS and Android devices. Our Technology development team, working with our Product development team, did a brilliant job using HTML5, the programming tool kit of the future. Last August, we built and launched article pages for the Web with HTML5. Now come their mobile counterparts. That sequencing makes it possible for us to create content once and efficiently publish it across multiple platforms and devices.

Slightly above and to the right, you’ll see the new mobile article page. Forbes.com users will recognize it immediately — it’s nearly identical to the look and feel of our Web site article page (FORBES magazine also uses some of its key design elements). The functionality is much the same, too. The flexibility of HTML5 lets us transport the Web experience to the iPhone and the multiple browsers in the Android universe. The result: a fluid branded FORBES experience for our 25 million monthly unique visitors.

Put another way, we put the Forbes.com article page through our version of a distributor cap, which reformatted it for a smaller screen. On Forbes.com, various programming features — such as our editor-selected Vest Pocket of related links — are nestled alongside paragraphs. The cell phone experience is more linear, so those and other features are stacked beneath the text (you’ll have to go to the mobile site to see what I mean). And here’s a neat feature: if you click on those little arrows to the far right of the author’s photo and name, a draw slides down to reveal a short writer bio and his/her most popular posts (on the Web, those items exist in a right rail).

The mobile search experience also plays to the core of our People, Places and Company strategy. To the left, you’ll see the results for a search on Bill Gates. On the initial search, a photo of Gates appears (if you just searched for Bill, all Bills on our wealth and powerful people lists would appear alongside Gates). In this example, when you click on Bill Gates’s photo a second drawer opens that displays content related to him (Microsoft and Seattle). Click any of those photos and you’ll be taken to the People profile page, the Company Page or the Places page. Beneath that are stories about Bill Gates that you can sort by “Date” and “Relevance.”

We also put our Web home page and section screens through the distributor cap. So, we’re not only creating content once, we’re only programming it once, too. There is much more to do. We need to reformat many more pages for mobile (for now, mobile users will frequently be taken to the full Web site). And, in an upcoming mobile release, you’ll be able to swipe through photo galleries and articles with multiple pages. Video is also a work in progress.

The mobile site is a giant step for FORBES. It will grow with us as we continue the now year-long re-architecture of our digital and print products. In the spirit of a startup, this and all our efforts are disrupting both traditional journalism and long-standing advertising models:

By doing all this, FORBES is putting its authoritative journalism at the center of a social media experience, both online and in print. We’re also extending our brand to like-minded journalists, authors, academics, experts and marketing partners. We’re humbled by the results so far. Last month, we had record traffic of 25 million unique visitors, according to Omniture, a widely used industry reporting tool. That’s up 50% from a year ago. This month, we’re on track to repeat that performance.

We’re methodical about what we do, refusing to chase the bright shiny objects that blind so many others. It’s also about my Rule #16. We plan to remember that rule as we work through our exciting product roadmap for 2012.

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Was on the mobile site last night. One suggestion, you guys should add commenting to the mobile site, you can’t make any or i couldn’t figure out how to from my phone without switching to the regular site. As a whole though seems like you guys are one of the few companies that actually bothered to try the website out on your own phones while designing it.

Great observation. That’s coming in the next months as we re-do our entire registration process, which as I’ve also written has been a frustration of mine. That new registration process will also enable you to use your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn credentials.